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Benchmarking the performance of recommended allocations to equities, bonds, and cash by international investment houses

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  • Bange, Mary M.
  • Khang, Kenneth
  • Miller Jr., Thomas W.

Abstract

We conduct performance tests of the recommended asset allocations made by a panel of international investment houses (the "Houses") from 1982 through 2005. We compare the returns and Sharpe Ratios from the recommended-weight portfolio against those of several benchmark portfolios and to a set of 10,000 returns and Sharpe Ratios from randomly shuffled-weight and shuffled-weight change portfolios. We find that the Houses generally fail to outperform the benchmarks. The shuffled-weight change benchmark exhibits a robust "style-preserving" property in that the average portfolio standard deviation is nearly equal to the portfolio standard deviation from the actual recommended weights.

Suggested Citation

  • Bange, Mary M. & Khang, Kenneth & Miller Jr., Thomas W., 2008. "Benchmarking the performance of recommended allocations to equities, bonds, and cash by international investment houses," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 363-386, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:empfin:v:15:y:2008:i:3:p:363-386
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    Cited by:

    1. Joseph Gerakos & Juhani T. Linnainmaa & Adair Morse, 2016. "Asset Managers: Institutional Performance and Smart Betas," NBER Working Papers 22982, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

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